It is possible to create an interesting compare-and-contrast exercise using the coalition's recent education policy announcements and Douglas Adams's The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy. In the latter, a group of "hyper intelligent, pan-dimensional beings" (for which read Michael Gove plus acolytes) want to know the answer to "life, the universe and everything". In order to do so they build the supercomputer Deep Thought (of which Gove thinks most highly and believes will be revived instantaneously by the cancelling of AS-levels). Deep Thought took 7,500,000 years to come up with the wrong answer; Gove is able to come up with the same quality of response far quicker.

Leaving aside the gut-wrenching disappointment that pulling the plug on Building Schools for the Future has caused communities desperate for their leaking 60s prefabs to be pulled down and replaced, little has been made of two further policy announcements that reveal the ideological nature of what is to come in the way of cuts: the provision of £4m to expand Teach First into primary schools, and the announcement that there would be no budget whatsoever next year for the training of higher-level teaching assistants.

How the £4m expansion of Teach First will console those communities whose schools are not now to be rebuilt is a mystery. "Yes, we are cancelling the previous administration's plan to rebuild every school that needs it. And yes, we are dismantling state education, but that is OK, as we are going to give a few primary schools some unqualified new teachers."

Teach First is the charity that places recent graduates from Russell Group universities in inner-city schools for a minimum of two years. Contrary to some teachers' initial reaction to the programme – "Great! CV building for poshos" – the charity has been the cause of many bright and dedicated young people entering the profession. Teachers such as Manjit More, from Pensnett high school in the West Midlands, which has been identified as outstanding by Ofsted. He has committed himself for far more than the initial two years and describes himself as a "lifer".

The vast majority of Teach First graduates come into the profession fully cognisant of the workload entailed, and where it has been particularly successful is in importing genuine subject specialists. There are serious, expert geographers and mathematicians standing in front of inner-city kids as a result of the programme.

In a recent speech, the programme's founder, Brett Wigdortz, appeared to claim that Teach First is the solution to feudalism in education. He said: "In England the biggest determinant of how good a child's education is, is the wealth of their parents ... Teach First has been working towards this solution for eight years." But there is an argument that extending the programme into primary schools will be less successful, as those with subject expertise may not want to alchemise it into the more generalist approach of the primary school all-rounder.

What is more, Teach First is a charity. As such, its philanthropic intent is in perfect keeping with the gibbering nonsense of Cameron's big society non-idea. More volunteers make for cheaper public services and Teach First graduates are not, initially at least, very well paid.

The announcement that the training budget for higher-level teaching assistants would be scrapped sneaked out almost unnoticed and is indicative of where the coalition have really set their sights.

This is a nasty, mean-spirited little cut, which can be taken as evidence of this government's desire to take away anything that supports those who have the least and who have little voice with which to protest.

There is a passage in Nick Cave's most recent novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, in which he describes the modus operandi of the consummate conman. Rather than attempting to fleece those who own chatels worth stealing; rather than shaking the "well-rooted tree", the consummate conman finds it more productive to shake the spindlier tree of those who have little anyway. The poor are far easier to shake down than the middle classes.

Teaching assistants are generally drawn directly from the communities their schools serve. They are paid scandalously low money for a full working week, are generally there to help children with specific learning needs, and have little by the way of promotional prospects. In dispensing with the funding to train them to the higher level, the Training and Development Agency (TDA) condemns teaching assistants to a career of low wages with no hope of professional advancement, and further denies the children they work with the chances of benefiting from their better training.

"People will still be able to gain HLTA status," says a spokesman for the TDA, "but the funding for training and preparation will need to be provided by the local authority from other sources. Alternatively, schools or individuals can continue to fund the training and preparation themselves." Teaching assistants should fund their own training! From purses bulging with unspent coppers.

Here we see yet another dark side of importing the DNA of the private sector into state education. Provision for children with special educational needs is shockingly bad in the independent sector, and they hope to bring it to the same level in state schools. It is this cut that is truly indicative of the coalition's attitude to those in society who have the most need. Quite frankly, they do not care a fig.